


i bet on losing dogs

by spookylegs



Series: early mornings hurt the best [2]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst and Romance, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, No mutual pining, Unrequited Love, also known as: javi feels too much waits too long and then it's too late, awe big bummer summer this is gonna hurt, no beta we die like men, this is not a love story, this is so sad. siri: play the scientist, yearning?!!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:15:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23077657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookylegs/pseuds/spookylegs
Summary: he loathes to admit it but that night felt colder, sharper than he wanted. had expected.it sounds awful but...he really expected to break your heart. not you breaking his.
Relationships: Javier Peña/Original Female Character(s), Javier Peña/Reader, Javier Peña/You
Series: early mornings hurt the best [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1699504
Comments: 17
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

you had not expected this, 

the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light

pummeling you in a stream of fists.

**_\- visible world,_ richard silken **

  
  


it’s still hard to remember that night; he can only grasp the corners. he remembers: 

yellow, buggy kitchen light on your wet eyes. glassy and so, so far away he could echo in the distance between you. 

the frown that carved your mouth just before you took one, quick breathe and spoke. he remembers it because there was a certain _edge_ in the tail end that bit into your cheek. the barest twist that made his heart swallow, sputter, choke. 

and 

he could not breathe. 

those things are only so clear to him now that he’s had time to pick them apart, pull their seams to frays and stretch, streeetch them nearly invisible before jumbling it all back together again. it — it takes him a lot of time. he loathes to admit it but that night felt colder, sharper than he wanted. had **expected**. 

it sounds awful but...he really expected to break your heart. not _you_ breaking his. 

okay. listen. look — **_look._ **

you looked at him. that one day in the car. you spent all day together. carpooling in the too early but pleasantly fresh and cool yawn of the day, when the sun’s barely blinking a pale and creamsicle light. you met in the lobby of the apartment building. it was blue. and you were rubbing sleep from your eye, when you said “gmorning” he felt it all the way to his toes.

— anyway. fast forward. 

it was almost the end of the day. both of you had been in the field for hours, crawling around city to city and sniffing leads. murphy was desk ridden, piled to the eyes with pictures and evidence to sift through. so, it fell to him and you. you and him. at the end there was nothing to be found, not to be heard. which, normally, would leave him wound up and bitter, chainsmoking until his chest felt heavy for another reason. _but_ you _—_ you had coaxed him into a late lunch-early dinner. had pouted and cow eyed and sighed until he eventually pulled to the side of the road and found something. anything. 

you settled on gas station sandwiches and watery coffee. you shared laughs and bits and pieces of memories from “home” on the ride back to the embassy and your shared apartment complex afterwards.

this is when it happened. 

  
it’s not a special moment, really. it’s — it’s just the moment **_you_ **became soberingly clear to him. where he saw, in slow grain, your nose crinkle, your lip catching an incisor before lifting and rounding your cheek. the moment he really took in the dusted tan across your brow, the way your hair swirled around a breeze breathed through the open window. when he closed his apartment door, locked it, checked it the sky finally darkened and the streets were in the moment of quiet in between the two halves of the day, he found that he felt...refreshed. his shoulders didn’t feel so knotted, his skin didn’t feel so heavy.

for the first time in a long time, he didn’t go out that night. didn't seek the comfort of another body. he made himself dinner, flipped through a couple channels, and nodded off to the soft shuffling of your feet in the room above him. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> but you met his eyes that night and didn’t look away.

“and the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.”

 **_uncle vanya_ **, anthon chekov

the beginning-beginning needs explanation lest he loses track again. 

  
(he hates that you do that now, by the way, distract him from the carefully placed lines of time/dialogue/happenstance until it all feels like a confusing mess of things; of brief sighs shared on a rooftop, of your left pointer finger tracing the map of veins on his right hand. you have ruined his starting point and his ending point, so now he only has the middle. there’s too much in the middle, too many things he doesn’t quite yet want to look at.) 

so, the beginning-beginning. as he remembers it.

everyone and their mother had been stuffed in one, god forsaken building. that is to say: each branch of the american government, unceremoniously dumped together, now working on top of one another. so many elbows. so many teeth. so many opinions and fresh-faced fucks that can’t seem to **_shut their mouth_ **when he’s talking — yelling! something at the person standing right next to him. the entirety of the day is spent hoarsing his voice and bumping shoulders. at the last slip of sunlight racing between the window shutters, he’s never felt more relieved than to go home, have a drink, maybe go dance. this has become a normalcy; a routine. it goes: he shuffles through his doorway, throws his bag down and keys on the couch, takes one long, burning drag from an amber bottle (the pretense of preparation, of 'just one glass' are gone), then out the door once more. it's maddening, sure. but if his body keeps moving and his mind stays at the threshold between the grimy hallway and his ugly apartment, he won't think about young men with bullets in their teeth and the powdery white substance that brought him here and them in the dirt. all in all, the routine works. 

he’s packed up and turning a corner to the stairwell when he hears a litany of cheers dance down the hallway to his right. a pause. he should go, he 

ends up in the doorway of a tiny office.

it’s all the fresh-faced fucks (newer cia recruits flown in three mornings prior) celebrating “absolutely nothing other than the sheer simplicity of being”. that is what one of them says, honest to god, when he asks _what the fuck is going on_? you’re sitting in the middle of them all, perched easily on the desk with your ankles crossed. your little plastic cup sloshes when you laugh and toss your head to look him straight through. 

now. people struggle to look at him directly. he knows what they see when they do and really, truly he prefers that they look at the tip of his nose, the slope of his eyebrow. but you met his eyes that night and didn’t look away. 

(he would learn, later on, what it meant when you did.) 

he ended up staying and you talked to him quite a bit. he likes to think he had an idea of who you were relatively early on. you told him about your parents, the program, and your excitement to be in bogotá. he listened intently and (shamefully) paid most attention to the glittering sheen of night time heat that peeked between the buttons of your shirt. you called him out on it, said: 

“you know where my eyes are, peña.” 

there. that’s when you had him. embarrassingly early and far sooner than he had you. there’s a picture of the two of you from that night, he keeps it in his wallet still. your faces are blown out by the flash, hazy around the lines with no definite features. you wrapped yourself around his arm, pressed right along his side in the last seconds before it was taken. he looks thrilled and caught off guard. a permanent crease exists down the center where he’s folded, unfolded, folded it time and time again. a permanent separation where you exist in one plane and he the other.

he’s ran his fingers down that line more often than he’ll care to admit. like the more he follows it, the clearer things will be. he wonders sometimes if it was an omen all along. a totem of the shitstorm to follow, tucked away in his back pocket. eventually, he’ll take it out of his wallet. eventually, he’ll tear it up over a trashcan and won’t think about the pieces when they fall. for now, he’ll settle for holding it between his fingers, delicate like it’s flypaper, squinting at your expression until a headache murmurs at his temples. until he absolutely must turn the bedside light off and sleep an hour or two, because the sun is bleeding through his window, because he must face you in the daylight again and cannot let you see all the things he wanted to say, wants to say, will not say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i listened exclusively to "the night we met" the entire time writing this, can you tell?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you made a content noise that he felt in his knees and asked him how he liked his eggs. 
> 
> now, he wishes you pulled away.  
> fuck you for not just pulling away.

“you’re never coming back to me, are you?”

“never say never, but…”

“but no.”

“but no.” 

**_august osage county_ ** , tracy letts

presently, he’s staring at the back of your neck. at the soft curve of where it meets your shoulders. your hair is up today, twirled in a haphazard thing atop your head that he knows you fashion when you’re focused. focusing on something else while he focuses on you.  _ fucking sad _ . but he eyes the lift of vertebrae pebbled under your skin anyway. in a rare moment of vulnerability, he laid his forehead there one afternoon. you were turned away from him, like now, weeks(?) ago in his kitchen. bacon sizzled and spat while you rambled about your coworkers, weekend plans. it made him feel nostalgic. it made him ache for something he denied himself a long time before and struggled to deny himself then. it made him feel domestic. he nosed his way from the shell of your ear to there, saying absolutely nothing but telling too much anyway. it hurt to crane his neck that far down, but to feel you close and tucked away between his arms, to feel the buzzing thrum of your voice when you spoke... it. it's still hard to name. 

good? that doesn’t feel right. not even adequate. but it’s all he has. 

_ good. _

you had stiffened in his hold then relaxed, head resting at the space between his collarbone and shoulder. he travelled to mouth at your pulse. you made a content noise that he felt in his knees and asked him how he liked his eggs. 

now, he wishes you pulled away.

fuck you for not just pulling away.    
  
he turns away. shuffles papers around his desk.

it has made it, he begrudges to admit, very difficult when he sees you at work. it used to be a secret note on the undercurrent of each interaction. something electric and jumping between everything said. a little shared excitement. you ask him to pass the creamer like it’s normal, when the two of you end up in the cramped pantry at the same time. there’s no secret anything in the way you speak and the simplicity of it  **burns** his ears. he moves sluggishly like you’re a creature entirely alien, like he didn’t whirlwind his apartment the other night after you left, and places it much too firmly on the counter for you _ not  _ to notice. You look at the side of his head, his hand, count all of his fingers. 

“ _ ooh _ -kay then.” 

you’re gone shortly after that and he can release the breath straining his chest. You say something to someone else down the hallway and the sound of it makes him pinch the bridge of his nose. he feels wearily too young, like he’s seventeen again and you’re the first girl in the world that has turned him down. he decides he’s taking his coffee bitter, black, boiling. it doesn’t matter that he scorches the roof of his mouth. he tells himself he kind of likes the way it hurts. 

on his lunch break he fucks someone else. well, he fucks someone. there is no ‘else’. makes an excuse to no one before leaving, finds his way to a brothel on muscle memory, pulls close to him the person that slinks up to him first. she’s pretty and does not deserve the way he nips her jawline, the harshness behind each thrust. the hand tight around her throat. when he watches her wobble later on, he winces and tips her generously. there’s an apology in his expression that just can’t make it over his teeth. she smiles, thanks him, and brushes her fingers along his hairline. asks him when he’ll return. he lies, “soon enough.” 

he feels worse than when he left. the sex was fine, he came  — great. but he.

_ fuck _ ! **fuck** !!  **_fuck_ ** !!!

he wants the  _ after _ . the holding. the hand —  _ his  _ hand — between  _ your _ shoulder blades pressing you closer. he wants to touch and feel and be felt. he wants to half-pull his shitty, scratchy sheets over your interlocked waists and almost fall asleep with your mouth on his sternum. 

he vomits before he gets back to the embassy. existing on sex, coffee, and cigarettes runs his body into the ground and he makes a mental note to at the very least grab a bag of chips on his way up. he’s ruminating on what a shit fucking day it’s been when he meets you in the stairwell. 

you halt entirely when you see him, one hand gripping the railing and the other your bag. he knows how he looks; shirt untucked, buttoned only to a barely work-appropriate amount. he will not think about the mess that is his hair. he watches you take note of all of these things and a sick glee jumps beneath his rib. he hopes with all his heart that it hurts, even just a little. he hopes you think about him all the rest of the day. above someone else, with someone else. that the lipstick stain on his collar drives you insane. even just momentary. 

(he hopes he crosses your mind. at all. full stop.)

but instead your grin looks bemused. like you’re friends and you caught him and it’s _ funny. _

“have a good night, javi.”    
you skip down the stairs, pass him by, and beyond. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and it-- it… it’s your chapstick sitting on the counter tucked away behind forgotten mail and crumbled notes. yellow street light brightens the wrapping and somehow that in itself is enough to cut a memory right out of him.

“memories, as my father once said, are porcupines. 

to hell with them! stay away from them! they make you unhappy. 

they ruin your work. they make you cry.”

**_\- ray bradbury, the illustrated man_ **

he is a storm of things and noise coming through the front door, the last week dragging in around his ankles. his keys are thrown down at the same time he kicks off his shoes. his elbow catches in his jacket sleeve and he damn near dislocates his shoulder to free himself with crackles of irritation rising the hair at the nape of his neck. his jacket slumps to the floor in one last act of defiance after he hangs it so he leaves it there. nearly misses the last step and smarts his ankle with a heavy  _ thump _ ! that snags in his chest momentarily. 

with a snap he’s come back into himself then. standing, too quiet, in the junction between his kitchen, living room, and the front door with a clicking, straining jaw. his hands clenching and unclenching with want to just. to just fucking. to fucking **_hit_ ** something. the apartment -- his home? -- does not pacify him. he could howl if he wanted to, just to fill the space with something else other than his loud, snarling breath and the sink dripping. tell the walls about all the red tape he’s been slashing through, the  _ technically very  _ illegal activities he’s embroiled in. the injustice and the glory (or lack thereof) he’s been too stupid to stop chasing. a picture of his father smiles back from the wall to his left waiting for the explanation that rots in his throat. he swallows hard. he’ll have a drink instead. 

of course, he overdoes it. the couch holds him, cradles him in its worn out cushions while his ceiling ebbs and sways. this is where he’ll waste away his evening, he decides, like so many before. not enough energy to take himself to the shower, to bed even though his neck aches from the angle he’s pushed it into. no, he’s staying right here though his feet begin to prickle and numb. and his lower back -- fuck this. 

he’s turning, tucking into himself. almost hugging himself. this’ll how he’ll sleep then, like a stupid fucking child sapping up self comfort in a dark room. only his lights are very much on and too bright, white and loud burning right through the peel of his eyelids from this angle. the same ire from earlier sparks right back up and eats up his drunken thoughts wildfire quick. of course he can’t have one night -- just  _ one  _ god forsaken night where he stumbles right into an inky, heavy sleep. 

the light. he’ll just shut off the light. then back to the couch. sleep. hopefully. sleep long until tomorrow comes and he can be angry about all of it then. a tilting room greets him and a sad little moan croaks from him, the first noise he’s made in hours. if he keeps his eyes open for too long he knows he’ll be sick so he’ll have to be quick about this. up then back. it’ll be easy. he just needs to get up. get the fuck up--

almost trips over himself on the way into the little hall. he squints all the way over, the swaying room blurry in the slivered window of vision he’ll allow himself. he takes the light out with great success. only paws at the wall lamely once instead of twice like the night before. the sudden darkness takes some of the edge off, smooths the deep frown his brow seems to always pinch into. alright, to the couch. he settles back in, curls back up on the same spot, cheek pressed down into the now cold leather. an arm crossed one over another, tucked into his armpits. now...to just sleep. he presses his closed eyes a little firmer and keeps himself very still. tells his breathing to slow down to a deeper, fuller lull. hips shifting, his lower half turning onto the couch, legs extended outwards and over the edge of the couch, leaving his upper half curled away in an odd, uncomfortable twist. he moves onto his back fully. one, long breath. his legs start to go numb so he struggles himself upwards on the couch with his neck cranked at the same angle that started all this fucking nonsense to begin with and --

he sits up and pitches to the side a little, hand sliding back to keep his purchase. he’ll get a glass of water. after all, his mouth feels both sticky and dry with an ugly taste on his soft palate. and he does just start, teetering and grumbling his way into the kitchen. in the semi-dark now too, wonderfully. as he’s rifling around the cupboard, there’s a red something that bobs then ducks in the corner of his vision that has him lurching a little fast, slamming the door down right on his fingers. and it-- it… it’s your chapstick sitting on the counter tucked away behind forgotten mail and crumbled notes. yellow street light brightens the wrapping and somehow that in itself is enough to cut a memory right out of him. 

sweet, waxy cherry on the corner of his mouth where you kissed him before you dashed out because you were late and no, you weren’t riding to work with him! 

his tongue runs over his bottom lip before he can convince it not to. he tastes salt and bitter nothing. snatches the little tube up and warms it in his grip. he had been doing so well burying you far, far down in your own forgotten closet of his mind. he stuffed you all up in there months ago when simply looking at you started leaving him raw and ragged, his mind too hyper focused on the way your hand fell into the edge of someone else’s elbow in a just friendlier than coworkers way while he desperately scrambled a reason together as to how you can be so cruel to flaunt it right in front of him. and then something would slip and click into place and he’d realize all over again that you were not flaunting. you were not dangling anything in his face. you were not considering him in the way he still considered you every waking second. it was unhealthy. and it fucked with his work, so into your own closet you went and he swore he deadbolted the door. 

but he missed the chapstick. 

so he ends up in front of your apartment jingling around a grocery bag of forgotten bits and things you left behind; an earring with no back, a couple of cheap hair ties, a mug that’s not yours but you used it enough that it may as well be. the chapstick. he flitted through his apartment for an hour, bent on scrubbing the last remnants of you out of his space. then he’d sleep, he told himself over and over, then he’d be able to sleep  _ finally  _ and restfully because you -- he knew you had been hanging around there, in the corners, in the air. he knew if he cleansed ( **exorcised** ) the place, his apartment, his home(?) of you then you wouldn’t be able to find him in that box of sight between his squinting eyes, swaying alongside the room, just before he fell asleep.

three. pragmatic. knocks. just like that -- solid, so you know he means business. nice and strict wrapt from the back of his knuckle. and he waits...and waits...and-- his shoulders tick up just that much then tense. it’s becoming just a hair annoying waiting here and also a scratch of...something. else. something else he doesn’t want to talk about because it’s a ridiculous thought! it’s been how many months now? no, absolutely not. you had a **_fucking_ ** closet. 

his teeth grind audibly, a harsh, crumbling sound that makes him wince. he starts to figure he’s spent enough time standing around like a moron. it’s time to go. his arm extends to drop the bag on your door handle for you to find in the morning. he knows it’d be a more appropriate _ fin _ to the stunted nothing you shared. the contents inside shift and clink around like an emphasis.

you open the door. 

and he realizes with a jolt of sobriety that you and likely the rest of colombia were asleep. unlike him. and he’s woken you up to...give you back your chapstick. fuck. this looks desperate -- pathetic -- 

“javi?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this sat in my drafts for so long.  
> i hope everyone's been safe both physically and mentally


End file.
